| A good day to be at a Linux show |
Mar. 23, 2006
I couldn't make it to BrainShare, Novell's tradeshow in Salt Lake City, this year because my plane had a small fire behind its cockpit's control panels. Afterwards, the airlines couldn't find a way to get me there until 24-hours later, so I skipped the show. Darn!
Because of that, I missed seeing Novell Inc. senior VP John Dragoon holding up a copy of USA Today with a headline trumpeting, "Microsoft Delays New Windows" as the convention hall crowd of several thousand cheered on.
Yes, it would have been a great day to have been part of that crowd.
But, even though I missed the show, even from my home office, I can tell that it's has been a great week for the Linux desktop.
I talked with several Novell executives by phone this week, and time and again they said that they were doing their darnest to make SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 not just the best Linux desktop, but the best business desktop, period. And, yes, they meant better than XP Pro and Vista.
As Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Novell, said, "as enterprises kick the tires of the new desktop in trials, companies will migrate from Windows to SLED."
When I talked with Jack Messman, Novell's CEO, I think he laid out Novell's desktop plans clearly and realistically. "People tell us," he said, "that the more they learn about Vista, the more they see that switching to it isn't a migration; it's a conversion."
In addition, Messman said, "the hardware costs are significantly higher. This gives us an opportunity to get customers to consider SLED. We know that most of them aren't going to move. They're stuck in their ways. But, Linux will capture a fair share of the desktop business. We don't think that Linux will have an immediate, big impact on the desktop, but in the future, the only two operating systems will be Linux and Windows."
One reason why Messman thinks this will happen, is that both SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and SLED have essentially the same codebase. "Once you get someone trained up on SUSE Linux, they'll be able to support it from the datacenter to the edge servers to the desktop. It will be a great IT cost saver," he said.
I was also told that Novell is working extremely hard on making SLED as solid as possible. Personally, I've been concerned with some of the components such as Beagle, the desktop search engine. In the past, Beagle has been a memory hog.
With the latest update, Beagle 0.2.3, this problem should have been fixed. I hope so. When Beagle works, it's the greatest desktop search utility ever. And, yes, I'm including Mac OS X's Spotlight and Google Desktop, and I use both of those every day.
One of the ways that SUSE is delivering the goods is that, according to Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of marketing for Linux and open source, they've been working very closely with Novell's community-based Linux developers who are hard at work on OpenSUSE.
Mancusi-Ungaro said, "We have a lot of integration between OpenSUSE and SUSE. We're now making our first forays into delivering a higher level of community development to OpenSUSE." While OpenSUSE developers won't get access to the CVS (Concurrent Versions System) anytime soon, they will get more access to the code this year.
Perhaps the most important development, as Novell prepares to take on Microsoft mano a mano on the business desktop, is that Novell is talking to OEMs about getting its upcoming SLED 10 preinstalled on PCs.
In particular, Dell Inc. has been mentioned as a company that might preload SLED on its business PCs.
Dell has recently been inching closer to pre-loading Linux on its PCs. In a recent DesktopLinux.com interview, Michael Dell said, "If there was a leading or highly preferred version that a majority of users would want, we'd preload it."
Novell is certainly doing its darnest to become the "highly preferred" business Linux desktop
Additionally, Dell and Novell have been working closely together in recent months. With the release of ZENworks 7 Linux Management - Dell Edition, Novell and Dell brought together Novell's software management tools with Dell's hardware management tools.
While it's far too early to predict that a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) is finally going to preload a desktop Linux in the US, SLED's chances certainly seem better than any of its predecessors.
And -- who knows? -- between SLED's technical and support virtues, Vista's vices, and now Microsoft fouling up its OEM partners with Vista delays, maybe it really is time for Linux to make a bold move forward on the desktop.
 About the author: Ziff Davis Internet senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about technology and business since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the
way.
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